The Hunting of the Snark
by Harmony Bites
Summary: Severus seeks out Luna's help for without it he shall "softly and suddenly vanish away." Quoted phrase comes from Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark." Snape/Luna


The below was originally written for **silburygirl** for the **snuna_exchange**. I was told it was too Gen, and would have to be revised were I to participate, so I withdrew the story. I'd like to thank my betas, **bambu345** and **Djinn** and my Bripicker **lifeasanamazon** for all their hard work. I asked for basically a last minute beta to get the story submitted on time, and they came through.

**Recipient's Prompt**: Brief Fic Prompt One: Luna is living in an obscure place studying equally obscure magical creatures. Snape seeks her out, although whether or not he knows that he'll be dealing with Luna before he sees her is up to you.  
**Summary**: Severus seeks out Luna's help for without it he shall "softly and suddenly vanish away." (Quoted phrase comes from Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark.")

* * *

**The Hunting of the Snark**

When Severus arrives in Jukkasjarvi in early evening, the arctic gust hits him with an uppercut punch after the low blow of Portkey travel. He falls to his knees, retching. Washing his mouth out with snow, he feels a tap on his shoulder. Spinning away, he draws his wand--only just resisting the impulse to cast a Stunning Hex. It's been that sort of month.

Bloody hell, that kind of decade.

He blinks at the sight that meets him. Tufts of sandy hair peek out of the hood of a red reindeer parka. Luna's almost invisible eyelashes and brows mean that her protuberant eyes look house-elf wide. Marvellous. He's drawn on the very woman he needs to coax into lending him her most precious possession and terrified her.

"Wasn't your wand birch?" Luna asks without as much as a blink or quaver in her voice.

"It changed." He slowly returns his yew wand to its sleeve holster.

* * *

Luna hasn't changed in the five years since he last saw her, except maybe grown a little more into her own face, looking less like her mother Cynthia. The brilliant Cynthia Gladstone four years ahead of him at Hogwarts. While Luna's attention is on ordering their drinks, he slips a pill under his tongue for the Portkey lag, and swallows it dry--not that it will do anything for his neurological damage.

The Ice Hotel's glacial bar makes Severus feel encased in Dante's lowest circle of Hell, where the damned are immersed in ice to the depth of their treachery. A little preview of where he shall soon wind up, no doubt sunk to his eyebrows. Potter and Granger may have pulled off his freedom, but Severus doesn't feel exonerated.

The walls, columns, the bar itself all are suffused with a blue glow. All around them the patrons are clad in parkas and anoraks, their breath coming out in visible contrails like dragon puffs. The nearby magical ice castle of Durmstrang would be warm, but this Muggle construction, though warmer than outside, and blessedly out of the stinging wind, is still below freezing.

"….And you know they mate in mid-winter and hibernate in spring, I think, which is part of why they're so elusive. So, I convinced Professor Scamander that all the conditions for the Crumple-horned Snorkack can be found here, and--"

"Just the place for a Snark."

"Snorkack."

He lifts an eyebrow. "Right. Just look out for the Boojum, or you might 'softly and suddenly vanish away.'"

She tilts her head at that and gives him a Mona Lisa smile. Then a little giggle erupts, one that almost can be mistaken for a burp. And then she throws back her head and guffaws, her entire body rocking with her mirth; she breaks at the end into cackles and snorts. "Hermione gave me _The Complete Carroll_." Her smile dims a bit.

He thinks the gift was a way of saying "the only place you'll find your creatures is in a book like this." Or that Luna thinks so. She presents such a serene face to the world people count her as dim, forgetting just how piercing her insights can be. "You tracked down and proved that Nargles and Heliopaths exist. I wouldn't put anything past you."

At his words she beams at him, her face seeming more aglow in the candlelight.

He regrets his gibe about Snarks now. If that swot Granger meant to sneer at Luna with that gift, that is reason enough for his support, even if, in the past, whenever she talked about the Crumple-horned Snorkack, he was tempted to skip the Killing Curse and just strangle her with his bare hands. Yet, he seems to be the one on the Hogwarts staff least shocked by Luna's successes.

But he knows that, underneath all her fluff, Luna is never less than competent. She might have come up with the most ridiculous answers when he had called on her as a student, but the potions of the unbearable harebrained lunatic were perfect as often as that of the insufferable know-it-all. And when Luna returned to resume her sixth year, there was a new discipline and focus about her that dispelled her perpetual dreamy state. If her father's gaffe with the Erumpent Horn made her no less a true believer, it did make her ask Severus what it would take to make others believe.

Luna became a scientist. More her mother and less like her father. From crackpot to crypto-zoologist.

Severus mixes the vial of his Regenerative Potion into his Glögg, the hot spiced wine served at the Ice Bar. The warmth of the drink and working of the potion flushes his body with heat, a temporary sense of well-being. He hates to ask Luna, to be indebted to someone he failed so deeply. Answering her questions and suppressing his sneers for her last two years at Hogwarts doesn't, for him, make up for her being held captive on his watch, even if she had been captured off the school grounds.

He wondered back at Hogwarts if she took his guilt-born consideration for more, just as he wondered, at times, about her fanatical gaze being directed too often towards him rather than inwardly towards Nargles and Heliopaths and Crumple-horned Snorkacks, especially in the last year after her friends had left school. But he was her teacher, and it was easier not to let his thoughts linger that way.

"I…I need to study your mother's journal. Xenophilius said you always keep it with you. Filius told me Cynthia was working on recreating Rowena's diadem when she died. Now that we have the original back, even with the magic within it broken…" He might able to recreate it, see if the object had its famed powers; if it could regenerate nerve centres frayed by repeated Cruciatus curses and Nagini's venom. Perhaps help the Longbottoms as well.

"Of course."

"You'd trust me with it? I'd--"

"Your nose, it has some white spots. Does it tingle?" She leans towards him and presses her fingers against his beak of a nose, which feels hot and tender at her cool touch. "You might have a bit of frost nip."

Her fingers trail down to trace his cheekbone, then both her hands are cupping his cheeks. He sees her lips rising to meet his with an inevitable and terrible fatality.

He jerks away. "I can't." He knew what it was to love but not be loved back, feeding your soul on grass and dirt. His heart was frozen and numb, and he feared not only the fiery pain that would come with thawing, but that the tissue was damaged beyond repair. Fine recompense his heart would be for her help, even if he felt inclined to give it.

She shakes her head. "I won't let you 'softly and suddenly vanish away.'"


End file.
